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“Look!” Caleb shouted, pointing at a smudge of pewter-colored fog on the horizon.
“That can’t be,” Una mumbled. She tugged on her spooked horse’s reins and squinted. The darkness grew, creeping across the blue dome of the wide sky in a line. No lightning touched down. No funnel cloud announced a tornado. The unnatural fog flew against the wind. “It is the Hive,” she breathed, awe and fear immobilizing her face.
Lily felt hands around her waist, snatching her off her horse. “Fire,” her Tristan said in her ear as he placed her numb body on the ground. “You need to build a fire.”
There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. The gentle breeze sighed through the grass, turning it over and flashing the light side of the blades against the dark in teasing ripples. Its placid beauty taunted them. There wasn’t a tree, a rock, or a river in sight. The open plain left them as exposed as if they were in a raft on a becalmed ocean.
“What do I burn? There’s no wood,” Lily said, holding her hands out uselessly.
“Burn the grass,” Caleb ordered as he dismounted. “Light it all on fire if you have to.” He turned to the remaining braves and addressed them. “Everyone get off your horses and set them loose. They’ll only slow you down in this fight, and they’ll probably just die under you anyway.”
Juliet steadied Lily’s hands while she struck at her flint. “Calm down.”
Lily looked up at her sister, and her voice came o
ut wispy and weak. “I think I’ve killed us all.”
“We’re not dead yet. Breakfast! Hurry and help,” she said, yanking up what hunks of yellowing grass the sea of green around them offered, and laying them in a pile in front of Lily. Breakfast unsheathed his dagger and started hacking his way through bundles of grass.
“Here,” Breakfast said, handing Juliet an extra knife. His face was grim and his mouth set in a line.
“We’ll keep gathering as much fuel as we can, and you keep giving us strength, okay?” Juliet said. Her big brown eyes were level and bracing. Lily nodded, focusing her panic into purpose.
“Stay upwind of the fire. I don’t have any way to contain it,” she said, and then turned her attention to the blaze already building at her feet.
Lily connected herself to the fourteen willstones awaiting her power. She drew in a breath, and the wind followed. The buzzing of the nearing Hive was drowned out by Lily’s shrieking witch wind. Licks of fire caught in the underbrush and the blaze spread out astonishingly fast. She gathered the heat—taking it, changing it, and then feeding it into the unlocked willstones of her braves.
A column of witch wind threw her into the air with a clap of thunder. Lily felt the physical sensations of all her braves as they raced toward the Hive ahead of the wildfire, but brightest and clearest among them was her Tristan. She let her mind nudge against his and he welcomed her in, opening himself to her so she could share his body. She felt his muscle and skin wrap around her. His hands flexed, and Lily felt the grip of his knives in them. They both reveled in the Gift, sharing the thrill with each other as Lily beat back the temptation to take him over completely. She wilted under the urge that ran through her like lust, and for just a moment she felt Tristan shy away from her with fear.
Please, Lily. Don’t.
I swear, I won’t.
Lily calmed herself and waited for the craving to pass. The only other person she’d shared this depth of sensation with had been Rowan, and Lily realized that by choosing Tristan to shelter her consciousness during the battle she had made him her new head mechanic. He seized the honor by pulling ahead of the other braves and leading the charge against the Hive.
They entered the swarm at a dead run. Sheer speed killed the first line of Workers on impact, but the Hive adjusted quickly and soon Lily felt the brush of furry bodies and the flutter of delicate wings against Tristan’s cheek. She suddenly felt a sharp stab on one of her brave’s throats. Pain and adrenaline shot through him. His heart pumped three times and stopped.
Lily felt his death and screamed. She sent a gust of searing-hot witch wind into the swarm—scalding her own warriors, but more importantly, singeing the edges of the Workers’ wings. They looked just like normal bees and their delicate wings were just as vulnerable to fire. Workers dropped out of the air by the thousands. Behind the front line of falling Worker bees, Lily saw larger shapes alighting on the battlefield and moving toward her braves. They were too far away from her Tristan for Lily to see them clearly yet, but she could make out the way they moved. The Warrior Sisters ran up to the front lines with a hopping, gliding motion that reminded Lily vaguely of an ostrich.
The Hive regrouped quickly against Lily’s scorching witch wind and sent the Workers out in thick clumps. The Workers on the outside of the tight balls of bee-bodies still fell from the air in droves, but the ones on the inside were able to land. The braves swatted at them, killing many, but in moments every inch of their skin was crawling with Workers. Lily sent energy coursing into her warriors. She thickened their skin to make them nearly impervious to the little stingers of the Workers. The Workers couldn’t penetrate deep enough to inject their toxin into the braves’ bloodstream. But sting after sting kept coming and finally the venom left on the surface of the skin started to eat its way in through the protection Lily supplied. Two more braves died as the Workers finally managed to sink their stingers in.
Lily needed to give her braves more strength—she needed to find a way to keep the Workers from stinging at all. She had to burn. She heard Breakfast’s voice in her head.
But there’s no stake. There will be nothing to hold you down in the fire.
I’ll hold myself down, Breakfast.
Lily positioned herself over the raging brush fire and dove down into the flames. Her skin began to burn, and she shrieked angrily at her own pain. She dug her fingers into the charred earth, gripping the ground to keep herself anchored there despite what her reflexes were urging her to do, and sucked heat into her smoke-colored willstone.
A moment of silence halted all motion on the battlefield, and for a heartbeat everything was still. Then a boom resounded across the burning prairie as a beam of light shot out of Lily and into the wheel of hurricane clouds above. Power pulsed across the blazing grass and the Worker bees were swept back. Her braves paused for a moment in ecstasy, drawing in a deep draft of pure power, and launched themselves at the Warrior Sisters as they entered the fray.
Through her Tristan’s eyes, Lily saw her first Warrior Sister head-on.
Her upper body was shaped like a woman’s and she had unnervingly human hands, but her legs were too long and they tapered at the bottom into insect barbs instead of feet. She had thick thighs and her knees were on the back, like those of an ostrich or a grasshopper, explaining her strange gait and breathtaking speed. The Sister’s skin was vaguely yellow and covered in plates of shiny black armor. As the Sister neared, Lily could see that the armor was a part of her, and it grew out of her skin in an exoskeleton.
Her head was the most disturbing part of her. She had a long stalk for a neck and her skull was ovoid, hairless, and topped with huge, multifaceted eyes. Her mouth was a jumble of tubes that was framed with a pair of shortened legs that brushed her face and constantly cleaned ash off her iridescent, alien eyes. Her head twitched and swiveled on her stalk-neck in blindingly fast and jerky motions. Lily got the sense that the Sister could see in a complete circle around her. She had no blind spot—not below or behind or above.
The Sister was over ten feet tall and she strode toward Lily’s Tristan, her enormous black-veined wings vibrating irritably as she tucked them behind her. Those human hands of hers unwound something she had wrapped around her narrow waist. It was a whip that was tipped in barbs. She unfurled the whip in one hand as she neared and ran her other hand across the small of her back, which came back covered in vaguely golden ichor. She transferred the ichor to the barbs at the end of the whip.
